Raj Jayadev started Silicon Valley Debug in Spring 2001, while working on the assembly line for Hewlett Packard. At the time, the dot.com explosion was at its peak, and Silicon Valley was considered to be the engine for globalization. The successes of Silicon Valley were attracting worldwide attention, but Raj found that the stories of the temporary workers on the shop floors were not being heard. As a reaction, Raj wrote a piece describing his working conditions, as well as stories that Indian elders had told him on the assembly line. This piece, along with stories by other temporary workers were compiled into a magazine called Youth Allies, and was distributed around San Jose and in assembly shops. Although it wasn’t realized at the time, this magazine was a vehicle for representation, and a voice for those who were previously ignored and left behind by the globalization movement.

Today, Silicon Valley Debug is an organization that strives to provide a voice for youth and marginalized people. Member’s voices can be heard in their magazine, website, radio show, and television program. De-bug allows members to connect with people in similar situations, and to not feel alone in a sometimes isolating global system.

An Interview with Raj Jayadev:

How have you seen globalization play out in your life, and how did that influence you to start writing about your experiences?

On the assembly line, we were the result of globalization. Where it's always low. So I was on this conveyor belt and on my conveyor belt we were assembling thousands of printers a day and folks from South Asia, from Latin America, from Vietnam, China, from Africa, and there was wage issues that came up, there was health and safety issues that came up, and so we started organizing. And so I wrote a piece about what it’s like and what these old Indian people told me, kicked it out just on a list serve actually because I was just writing as a journal, because it was feeling rough and I didn’t want to bring the others down. I didn’t know how we would ever win. So I kind of needed to get it off my chest, and unload it.

So, how specifically do you think the members of Silicon Valley De-bug have related and reacted to globalization. In what sort of ways has it (globalization) manifested?

Well, we are a result of globalization. People are here because their parents were forced off their land by globalization and stayed here because of globalization. So we are a construct of our parents being driven by this. But the other thing is, I’ll give you an example, the first thing when we asked the question what’s wrong with temporary labor, one of the guys at the office… we asked the question what’s the problem with temporary labor and from the outside it seemed really obvious. He was like low wages, low health benefits, everyone said the problem with temporary labor was that they keep lowering wages. But the problem is that on Monday its low, on Tuesday it’s got even lower, and we don’t think its going to change at all. That’s how globalization affects us.

How do you do your popular education work, in relation to the global?

Who knows if we do popular education or not, but we think it's the everyday capacity of people to reflect on their lives and use their experiences as a way of analysis, to create and imagine the world. That’s what we do that’s popular education. We use different vehicles like writing and art, among other things like video and music. So people started writing, and we put out a magazine. We knew it had to be bilingual to have relevance in San Jose. We learned a couple quick things early. One is that you can’t just say “worker is the identity”. This thing could change so much, partly because of globalization, peoples jobs rotate so quickly that they don’t have any permanence—they’re temporary. You’re in one industry for 6 months, then you’re in another, and another. People may stay in the same class but they don’t stay in the same job. And so you need to be able to talk to every aspect of people's beings. What’s their life like at work, what there life like at school, what their life is like at home, in relationships, in their relationship to God. And that's why you respect someone’s humanity.

So what specifically do you guys do that relates your work to youth, and why do you think youth are so important in bringing out this message of the other side of Silicon Valley? And, how does youth relate to globalization?

Well, to start it came out of the need at first. Young people, particularly young working people, are not looked at. The labor workers, specifically young people, are resourceful. So that was one key thing. The other thing is globalization has harmed the young people as much as anyone. Young people are probably worst off in working conditions if you look at it. So that alone is a relationship. What we’ve come to though is that young people tend to be able to carry complexity and learn what that is, and folks do analysis with that.

So, the idea is that young people have experiences and ways of looking at things that maybe lend itself to more complexity. But I don’t know if we look at youth as a target to be honest. We have people that come to meetings that are 50 years old. Our idea is that folks have the most effect when they’re speaking, there’s no cut-off age. As long as people are following and learning and trying to help themselves to strive to bring a certain strength, they are welcome to our group.